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Showing posts from February, 2011

Fresh Film Ideas

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I am in this impossible quest to find just one million original films in our lifetime.   How many people are there in the world?   India and China have more than one billion people a piece.   Asia as a whole has more.   There’s massive Africa and South America.   We can never have the correct figures because a child is born every minute.   In short, there are billions of people in the world and we still don’t have just a million original films.   My search reminded me of the popularity of the weekly Cosby show when I lived in Canada.   It had many original story lines.   There was one where Dr. Huxtable (Bill Cosby) wanted to read his Saturday newspaper.   He went to the kitchen.   There were children.   He went to the living room.   There were children.   He could not find one quiet spot because of his kids.   Parents around the world loved it.   It was their reality. One day Dr. Huxtable fetches kids from school.   They are all covered in snow suits, scarves and boots. His wife s

Defiant Widows

I am an NRI, translated into: no-real Indian.  I follow Indian cinema in my quest to find only one million original films before humanity as we know it disappears.  I will use the term Indian cinema sparingly because I only have access to Hindi films, not Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and other languages. Defiant widows I don’t know about other cultures but in mine, culture and tradition go such a long way back, sometimes it is not clear why certain norms were created.  Neel Kamal, directed by Ram Maheshwary is about re-incarnation but the film has a part where the character Girhar says, “They used to burn widows on the pyres of their dead husbands.” Not anymore.  They are spared but wear white.  Binodini, a young attractive widow (Aishwarya Rai) challenges some cultural norms in Choker Bali, directed by Rituparno Ghosh.  She questions why she should not wear jewellery and eat fish when her husband died a year after their marriage.  She also doesn’t accep

Six In One Film

I am an NRI, translated into: no-real Indian.  I follow Indian cinema in my quest to find only one million original films before humanity as we know it disappears.  I will use the term Indian cinema sparingly because I only have access to Hindi films, not Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada and other languages.  I think we should add Salaam-e-Ishq in the original stories we are looking for.  Why?  It is original because there are six stories in one screenplay.  I pulled it out of my DVD collection as a breath of fresh air.  My head is spinning with repetitive stories about four guys sharing a house or a life.  Mumbai seems to love such films. Nikhil Advani, the director of Salaam-e-Ishq had a very difficult task of making one quilt from six stories.  I wanted to say that everything revolves around Kamini (Priyanka Chopra), an egocentric item queen who wants to be a tragedy in a Karan Johar film.  I changed my mind when I realised that some stories dovetail into her, others don’t.

Ghee example

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  http://bonda.hubpages.com/hub/Kitchen-Parties I am an NRI, translated into: no-real Indian.  I follow Indian cinema in my quest to find only one million original films before humanity as we know it disappears.  I will use the term Indian cinema sparingly because I only have access to Hindi films, not Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and other languages. The 27 January 2011 post is about ghee films.  This is what i found in a supermarket in Killarney, South Africa.  It must be dramatically different from the real ghee in Punjab or any part of India. http://sweetnessthenovel.com